Design changes at irishtimes.com

Visitors to irishtimes.com today will notice that we've made some design changes to the homepage and to some other parts of the site. Headline and picture sizes have been reduced, we've reintroduced timestamps on our latest news feed and we've re-focused the top of the page more towards the breaking news stories of the day from Ireland and around the world.

We’ve also reduced the size and prominence of the highlights panels which link to features and other non-news articles and redesigned those panels to differentiate them more clearly from ads and other commercial elements. And there’s a greater use of dividers and separate font styles to distinguish the different elements on the page from one another.

We’re reducing picture size and picture count to make the homepage clearer and more useful, but also to reduce the time it takes for the page to load, particularly on mobile devices.

These are the most significant changes we’ve made since relaunching irishtimes.com three months ago. They’re all based on feedback we received from our users, who told us that some of the design was confusing.

Today’s changes are not a one-off, though. They’re part of a continuous development process which has been underway since the site relaunch, and has already seen, among other things, the reintroduction of the Irish News index page and the ‘Latest News’ list on the homepage, along with new streams of online content such as video and rolling live news. This development process is ongoing, and will continue to be informed by our users. So please do tell us what you think.